javax.cache explained

Another day, another Java EE 7 component making serious progress - javax.cache (aka JCache, JSR 107) is another JSR that has reached the draft status as Greg Luck, the co-spec lead shares in his recent blog post.

The specification defines a CacheManager API which references caches and their entries stored in a map-like collection enhanced with features such as transactions (optional), listeners or statistics.

The resulting API can be used in both Java SE and Java EE and is distributed cache aware. One benefit of having waited so long for this JSR to complete is that we'll get a set of annotations usable in managed environments (Java EE and Spring).

Ehcache will be offering the reference implementation with other implementations planned by Oracle, JBoss, IBM and others.

Greg also has a short video interview coming out of his JavaOne 2011 session in which he explains how simple it will be to move from one implementation to another.